I have been informed as of this afternoon, March 16, 2016 that the AFSCME retro checks have been made available by the Comptroller’s Office for distribution. The retro checks will be available for pick-up at the Office of Human Resources located at 69 West Washington, Suite 1940, Chicago, Illinois 60602 during the hours of 10:00a.m. – 3:00p.m. If you would like to pick-up your retro check from the Office of Human Resources, please send notification via email to teayonia.cannon2@cookcountyil.gov. Please note, should you decide to pick-up your retro check you are required to utilize your lunch break or accrued time. All remaining checks will be sent out via U.S.P.S Mail to the mailing address on the check at the close of business 4:00p.m., Thursday, March 17, 2016.

We are experiencing a technical difficulty on this post. In order to see the bid list, you have to be logged in to your email account. Even after accessing your email, you can’t get the bid list to download. Our apologies as we try to work this out. Union Reps do have a paper copy of the current bid list if you need to view it immediately. Thanks for your patience and support.

If you have had your bid request rejected because you listed “any position” for a transfer to a particular location, please email me the details and include the rejected bid. A class action grievance has been filed against management and was heard at the fourth level yesterday.

It is the Local’s position that when management proposed limiting the number of bids that a member could submit from 5 to 3, then the Union negotiated that as long as officers were allowed to continue the practice of requesting “any position” for a location, then the Union would agree to limiting the bid requests to 3. Management is now reneging on that agreement, and the Union is moving this grievance forward. If this has been your experience with regard to a submitted bid request, please email me at afscme3486@aol.com with the details in preparation for arbitration on this case.

The Local also has a class action grievance regarding the use of benefit time for late arrival and early dismissal – 2 1/2 hours per quarter. Management is attempting to change the interpretation of the language for late arrivals in that if an officer is 1.5 hours late, then they can only use 1 hour of their benefit time, not 1.5 hours, even if they have the benefit time available. Therefore officers would have to “make up or be docked” for the additional .5 hour according to Human Resources if they were 1.5 hours late. So by their logic, if an officer is late 2 hours due to weather, an accident or some other unforeseen circumstance, then even if you have all of your 2.5 hours of benefit time, you can only use 1 hour and have to make up or be docked for that additional hour. Please email me at afscme3486@aol.com with any encounter that you may have had with management regarding the use of benefit time for a late arrival in preparation for arbitration in this case.

Please be advised that the Probation Officers’ AFSCME 3486 bid list will be frozen effective Wednesday, March 23, 2016 at 5:00 pm. Please submit all bids and withdrawals to the Office of Human Resources via email to teayonia.cannon2@cookcountyil.gov before this date. Any bid request received after March 23, 2016 will be returned.

If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me at 312-603-0244.

You don’t smash the engine to make a car go faster, yet that is what Gov. Bruce Rauner is doing to Chicago, the engine of Illinois.

For more than a year, Gov. Rauner has been inflicting permanent damage on one of America’s great cities — and so too, then, on the entire State of Illinois — by holding the city hostage to a rigid “turnaround” agenda that is going nowhere. Rauner charged into office promising dramatic pro-business, anti-union reforms, but he’s fast shaping up as one of the least successful and most politically inept governors in the state’s history.

It is easy to say “a pox on both your houses,” as we have in the past, laying blame equally on the governor and the Democratic leaders of the state Legislature, especially House Speaker Michael J. Madigan. And certainly, as President Obama said in his speech to the Illinois General Assembly on Wednesday, there is a need across the political spectrum for “civility and compromise.”

But increasingly, with respect to Gov. Rauner, that is a false equivalency.

Both Democratic and Republican leaders over decades are to blame for the financial mess Illinois finds itself in, failing to sufficiently fund pensions and cutting overly generous deals with public employee unions. Nobody has clean hands. But Rauner’s performance as governor lies at the heart of the problem now. His largely inflexible demands are unrealistic and his coercive tactics ineffectual. His harsh rhetoric has made constructive compromise — the heart and soul of politics if not the private equity business — all the more difficult.

The irony here is that Rauner is championing some good stuff for which he might possibly, over time, cobble together bipartisan support. We’re with him on the need to reform the way legislative maps are drawn to make elections more competitive. We see merit in term limits for legislators. There’s a good argument that Illinois could go further in reforming its worker’s comp laws.

But Rauner came to Springfield and demanded it all, right away. Without even a nod to political realities, he front-loaded his entire agenda into the first year of his four-year term. And we’re troubled by his seeming obsession with curtailing the power of unions; is it so complete that he cannot see that he will never get a right-to-work law through the General Assembly?

This is Illinois, where Democrats control the Legislature — and more than a few Republicans stand with the unions, too. This is not Wisconsin, where Republican Gov. Scott Walker, one of Rauner’s role models, works with a compliant Republican legislature.

Bruce Rauner governs as if he were still a CEO dictating to underlings. It ain’t workin’.

Chicago, frankly, can’t take much more of this. Businesses are leaving or declining to set up shop here, wary of the uncertainties surrounding schools, higher education, taxes and public services. Even as the economy improves elsewhere across the nation, Chicago is losing or missing out on new jobs in every sector, from construction to white collar. Three weeks ago, as now widely lamented, General Electric took a pass on moving its headquarters to Chicago because, as one executive put it, “It seemed too big a risk.”

Our city’s safety net of basic social services is being shredded by a state budget impasse that is eight months old. Children, the poor, the elderly and the disabled are being harmed. And it’s bad for business. People like to live and work in a place that demonstrates a commitment to basic human decency.

When Lutheran Social Services must shut down 30 programs serving almost 5,000 people because the state won’t pay its bills, that’s not basic human decency.

Twice now Rauner has done damage to efforts by Chicago Public Schools to borrow hundreds of millions of dollars at a reasonable rate — money desperately needed to keep the schools open while CPS attempts to resolve its long-term financial problems.

In late January, the governor announced the state would “take over” the city’s public schools, sending a message to Wall Street that CPS was a risky mess. CPS put off its efforts to borrow.

A week later, when CPS again was negotiating a bond issue, Rauner again made a show of calling for a state takeover of the schools, which has zero chance of happening.

What was the damage from the governor’s grenade? Instead of borrowing $875 million, CPS scaled back the bond issue to $725 million. And instead of getting the 7.75 percent rate offered the week before, CPS was forced to borrow at a far more expensive rate of 8.5 percent.

Rauner’s frequent suggestion that CPS declare bankruptcy is in itself casually clueless. Bankruptcy can be a smart move in the private sector, but less so in the public sector. Bankruptcy would not necessarily save CPS significant money and, more to the point, families with options would bolt for the suburbs. No parent wants to send a child to a bankrupt school.

The fair assumption is that Rauner’s real motivation is to push the schools into bankruptcy to break the teachers’ union. If so, he will fail. But he is driving folks not entirely sympathetic to unions — folks such as Madigan — further into their corner.

Rauner’s grenades may not be intentional. Maybe he’s just a rookie pol goofing up. That would explain why the governor two weeks ago stepped to the microphones and announced that he and Senate President John Cullerton had come to agreement on a big pension reform plan. The two men had in fact agreed to a deal, but not exactly the one described by the governor, forcing Cullerton to shoot him down by press release. So much for trust, the bread and butter of politics.

Exacerbating Rauner’s inability to get anything done has been his penchant for ripping political opponents in personal terms. Most recently, he has said Mayor Rahm Emanuel “caved” when negotiating a deal with the Chicago Teachers Union, and he has said he’s “very disappointed” in how the mayor has handled a white-hot police misconduct scandal. Rauner added that he would sign legislation allowing Chicagoans to recall their mayor.

That would be the very definition of throwing a supposed friend under a bus.

Bruce Rauner is a governor now, not a CEO, in a politically divided state. He can’t tell everybody what to do. The only road forward is through compromise.

Gov. Rauner had better figure that out before it’s too late. Chicago, the engine of Illinois, needs fixing, not a beating.

Preckwinkle warns of possible county layoffs due to state budget impasse

With the state falling further behind in paying its bills, Cook County is starting to consider layoffs of workers who help collect child support and keep nonviolent offenders out of state prisons, County Board President Toni Preckwinkle said Monday.

As of Jan. 31, the state was $66.1 million behind in payments to the county because of the Capitol budget impasse that’s in its eighth month, Preckwinkle said. By June 30, the state could be more than $100 million behind.

Preckwinkle said she’s particularly concerned about nearly $19 million the county gets for child support enforcement to get parents to pay up for their kids’ care, as well as nearly $2 million for Adult Redeploy Illinois, an offender diversion program praised by Gov. Bruce Rauner.

The two programs employ about 300 people, she said. But if the state doesn’t pass a 2016 budget and continues to withhold funding as a result, she’ll have to reconsider the programs, she said.

“I wish I knew what the magic solution was; I don’t have any magic solutions,” Preckwinkle said. “We’re going to try to get the information out about the damage this is doing to the people in the county and encourage other people do the same. … When we start laying people off and shutting down programs, which clearly are important, we want people to understand why we — how we got to this place.”

Under Preckwinkle, the County Board last year approved a penny-on-the-dollar sales tax increase expected to pour $474 million a year into county coffers, but that money will go to pay county worker pension fund debt, repay other debts and cover construction projects and technology upgrades.

“Our present intention is to lay people off and to either skinny the program down or eliminate them, because we can’t carry the state,” Preckwinkle told the Chicago Tribune editorial board. “We’re going to get to the end of the state’s fiscal year, which is June 30, and then have to make some decisions. … We don’t have the money to float the state.”

Preckwinkle issued the warning a day before the County Board Finance Committee meets on the issue. She offered no advice on how to break the impasse, even as she suggested the Republican governor was wrong to link passage of a budget with his pro-business, union-weakening agenda.

Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities have already scaled back or cut out programs due to not getting paid for their services. Remember what King Bruce said during his campaign, “There may be some pain across the state, and I may face a strike, but I’ll reform those corrupt union leaders”.